Boy, Snow, Bird

“Folks were stampeding the last bus with everything they had—it was as if anyone unlucky enough to still be on the station platform turned into a pumpkin when the clock struck twelve.”

This is, of course, another reference to a folktale, this time Cinderella. Additionally, though, there is a contrast between the regular people rushing for the last bus and Boy doing so, as hers really is a matter of importance—she couldn’t plan her escape, only go when the opportunity presented itself, and she is genuinely concerned and fearful for her safety if she misses this bus.

“I couldn’t make up my mind whether the baby was male or female; the only certainties were near baldness and incandescent rage.”

This feels like a throwaway line in the first chapter, but in fact it foreshadows the eventual reveal at the end of the book that Frank was Frances, Boy’s mother. The baby is androgynous, but angry; Frank used to be a woman, then became a man, and spends much of that time angry. There are several such moments that feel like throwaway lines toward the beginning of the novel that are actually quite important once everything has been revealed. 

“Our misunderstanding worried me. I thought: I should talk to him. I should tell him it isn’t vanity. If it was vanity, I’d have been able to disguise it, all this insipid smirking at myself. Other women did it all the time; it was just that they didn’t get caught. No, the only behaviors we can’t control are those caused by nerves.”

There’s an irony in Boy being so concerned about what someone else thinks about her, given that her concern is that he (Arturo) will think her vain. However, this quote also speaks to the theme of passing, as she states that concealing one’s vain, true nature is something other people constantly do. It’s a form of passing that reinforces gender norms and expectations.

“Light fell through the leaves, liquid in some places, sometimes stopping to hang in long necklaces—but only for a second or two, as if aware it wouldn’t get much admiration in Flax Hill.”

There is an interesting contradiction in Boy’s observation here. Flax Hill, as Arturo explains to her earlier in the chapter, is a town where people make things: they are interested in the process, less so the end result. Boy believes, however, that the beauty of nature is something that wouldn’t get much attention, suggesting two different versions of appreciation. Boy’s version of appreciation is one that recognizes what’s inherently good in things; Arturo’s version (and the one he ascribes to the rest of the town) is one that recognizes how that thing can be made good. This is particularly poignant given the later reveal that Arturo and his family are passing—in other words, they are rejecting what’s inherent in them in order to remake themselves.

“This was going to be the best party we’d ever been to, because this party was going to represent the spirit of Herb Hill Beverages—fun, accessible, yet exclusive, just like us lovely ladies. Accessible and yet exclusive? It seemed to me that a party could only be one or the other…”

Boy’s comment is an intriguing connection to the theme of the duality of nature. It’s hard for her to understand here how something could be two opposing, very different things, yet throughout the novel, we encounter people who are trying to embody multitudes, including ones that appear to be incongruous at first glance.

“From where I was sitting the whole thing looked and felt like a flea circus. Not entertaining, not illuminating, just endlessly pathetic.”

Although Arturo is describing why he left academic history, this is a recurring idea in the novel: that history is endlessly repetitious. What happens next is what happens before, Kazim tells Boy; Arturo recognizes this, and leaves his field as a result.

“I took a magazine quiz on the bus home, but I knew the result before I added the figures up. I wasn’t in love with Arturo, and I wasn’t going to be. You don’t need a quiz to tell you these things; they don’t escape your notice. The flag stuffed into the back of my wardrobe was there because someone had once draped it around my shoulders in such a way that the touch of his fingers made me feel like a million bucks. That’s not how it was with Arturo. He held me so tightly that numbness stretched all the way down my arms […] It wasn’t as nice a feeling as the flag around my shoulders. But I felt more certain of it because it lasted longer.”

Boy distinguishes here between two kinds of love, even if she isn’t calling one of them love. Charlie makes her feel wonderful, but Arturo makes her feel safe and stable, even if she feels somewhat suffocated as a result. Later, she will recognize that she does love Arturo, but for much of the novel, she assumes that she can’t, simply because her initial understanding of love was the way Charlie made her feel.

“‘What’s the matter with you? Are you stupid? It’d be less phony if you cried for every man who’s been lynched in Tennessee or Alabama or South Carolina since eighteen hundred and whenever.’

‘Don’t tell me who to cry for and who not to cry for.’”

Much of the novel is a commentary on how to deal with racism in America, and this exchange between Sidonie and Phoebe is a good representation of this. Sidonie’s worldview is more either/or; she sees it as useless to worry about external concerns when their own people are being killed. Phoebe doesn’t believe there is one right way to grieve, though, and that her grief can and should extend beyond her own people, to anyone who experiences hardship.

“Ordinarily I stopped when we reached the corner of Tubman and Jefferson—less because there was a tangible change in the neighborhood and more because that was when we started seeing groups of colored boys leaning against walls with their arms folded, not talking or doing anything else but leaning. I figured they were the Neighborhood Watch, and left them to it. So did the white boys who followed us along Jefferson calling out Sidonie’s name.”

Boy is justifying her own fear here in comparison to what others feel, even if the result is the same. She assumes the white boys following them leave out of fear of the Watch; she leaves at the same spot, but in her mind, it’s not fear, but because she’s passing off the duty of keeping the girls safe to the boys in the Watch. Even if it has nothing to do with her own prejudices, the visual, to the girls, is still the same: a white person who refuses to enter the African-American neighborhood. It doesn’t help that, once alone, she walks quickly and even considers calling Arturo for a ride, demonstrating that she is, in fact, afraid of the neighborhood.

“It was the first piece of jewelry he ever made me, and it was the equivalent of an engagement ring. I say ‘equivalent’ because it was a bracelet, a white-gold snake that curled its tail around my wrist and pressed its tongue against the veins in the crook of my elbow. When I saw it lying on its bed of tissue paper, I didn’t want to pick it up, let alone put it on […] That snake was what he’d made for me, it was what he thought I wanted, was maybe even what he thought I was, deep down.”

The image of the snake recurs throughout the novel. Previously, Mia and Boy recall—possibly—a fairytale in which a beautiful woman immune to the powers of a magician turns out to have a snake for a heart. This suggests that a traditionally-evil thing can also be a source of beauty, and perhaps suggests that Arturo here is becoming Boy’s heart (or wants to).

“I looked into his eyes. He couldn’t return the gaze steadily, kept focusing on my left eye, then on my right. I could guess what he was thinking: that there were two of me, that was the explanation, that was why I was acting like this. I had applied this rationale to the rat catcher the first time he’d punched me.”

This quote is reflective of the novel’s theme of the duality of nature. Boy suggests that when people hurt us, we attempt to separate the good parts of people from the bad parts. However, she concludes that “it isn’t two people you’re dealing with,” which is not the same conclusion that the novel seems to draw or reinforces—we really are dual, or several, and it is situations that make us who we are.

“But once I got the situation in focus it stayed clear. No matter what anybody else said or did my father saw something revolting in me, and sooner or later he meant to make everybody else agree with him. Worst and weirdest of all was his weeping—I think he’d really believed that he was doing something good for me.”

This again foreshadows what we will come to know by the end of the novel: that Boy was the product of Frances’s rape, making her a complicated paradox for Frank: some part of her existence was revolting, but some part of him also truly believes that in order to protect her, he must make sure men only want Boy for who she is beneath. Of course, he cannot go through with it, hence the weeping.

“The snake bracelet Arturo gave me lies in its box for now, but soon I’ll be ready to wear it again. I’ve missed the feel of cold scales around my wrist. I can’t discount the possibility that the bracelet’s been molding me into the wearer it wants.”

As she gained weight from her pregnancy, she was forced to give up the evil-stepmother snake bracelet. Being ready to wear it again might foreshadow a return to that trope, as she will embody it (to some extent) when she sends Snow away to live with Clara shortly after this moment. It might also connect to the earlier fairytale; as she returns to normal, she will once again become impenetrable.

“So the women who pass Aunt Mia get a little extra pep in their step, but the men look at her the way I might look at a hot fudge sundae in the hours between lunch and dinner. You know, when you’re not sure if it’s a good idea to go ahead—you’re interested beyond a shadow of a doubt, but you wonder if it might turn out to be a little too much for you.”

Bird here expresses the dichotomy of normative experience for women like Mia: women look down on her for being unmarried and view themselves higher in response, whereas men can only think of what that means for her sexually. No one, from Bird’s perspective, is truly thinking about Mia as a person.

“Grammy Olivia gets extra meat but Aunt Viv lost her fiancé. Do I feel bad for blowing Aunt Viv’s cover? Not really. I accidentally brought truth to light, and bringing truth to light is the right thing to do.”

The concept of truth is a finicky one in the novel, yet Bird is certain that, regardless, truth is the best call. Of course, this is being stated by a child, so perhaps we are meant to understand this, then, as a simplistic worldview; or, perhaps, we should take the straightforward manner of this as evidence of the Whitmans’ and Millers’ wrongdoing. After all, Mia, as a journalist, takes the same approach, and even tells Boy later in the novel that she will do anything for her except not tell the truth.

“Most of [Mia’s] heroes are colored […] like I am. Aunt Mia says she didn’t go out looking for colored heroes. She says that’s just the way it worked out.”

There’s no way to know if Mia is telling the truth, although we learn early on that she was conscious of, and sympathetic to, the struggles of African Americans in the South. Yet, this is an interesting statement on the way we deal with race and representation; Mia’s nonchalance about why her heroes are mostly African American argues that our concern should be with acts, but it also suggests that in this period of American history, the bulk of the heroism was coming from people of color (which further reinforces the massive, revolutionary change taking place at that moment in time, in the late 1960s).

“And the oval glass, that dear old glass that used to stand on my dresser, it tried to give me what I wanted, tried to give me my face, but it kept showing me bits of faces that weren’t mine. There were slivers of Mom’s face, and Dad’s, and Aunt Mia’s, and Grammy Olivia’s, and others, some shreds no wider than my index finger. I don’t know who they were, there was even a man or two…”

Bird cannot see herself, but when she smashes the mirror, what she does see are bits and pieces of everyone else who comprise her. This suggests that we are not ourselves, but our heritage, and that even if we destroy ourselves, we cannot destroy the people who came before us and made us who we are. It’s also not clear who the men were, but assuming the magical elements, perhaps they might be Frank and Charlie, who certainly had an impact on Boy’s life.

“Upstairs Mom checked her lipstick while I stood behind her holding two pairs of earrings, a pair in each hand. She’d picked them out and couldn’t decide which to wear. In the mirror I looked like her maid, and that made me want to throw the earrings at her head and run.”

The nature of mirrors is never truly clear in the book, but here the mirror seems to be a reflection of what Bird does not want people to see. This is also a callback to earlier in the section, when she dressed up as Alice in Wonderland for Halloween, only for everyone but her mother to assume that she was dressed up as a housekeeper because of the color of her skin.

“School is one long illness with symptoms that switch every five minutes so you think it’s getting better or worse. But really it’s the same thing for years and years.”

Bird is concerned with a different setting, but the message is still the same: what happens next is what happened before. Unlike adult life, the divisions in school are clearly demarcated by grade; just like in school, however, adult life—and history—are endless repetitions of the same problems.

“I’m not talking about powers of darkness or something you can protect yourself from with crosses and holy water. Of course it is difficult to describe, because it seems so ordinary. Seems so, but is not. Evil studies the ordinary and imitates it.”

Frank suggests this specifically about Boy, though there is very little in our experience to support this reading; even when sending her away, Snow is not treated as an act of evil in the text, and Snow does not treat it as such when she returns. (In fact, Snow specifically rebukes the idea that Boy is evil.) This is a concern throughout the text, though: what does it mean to be evil?

“She was used to being treated like this. It was nothing to her. I had a moment of hating her, or at least understanding why Mom did. Thankfully it came and went really quickly, like a dizzy spell, or a three-second blizzard. Does she know that she does this to people? Dumb question. This is something we do to her.”

Boy doesn’t hate Snow, of course, but it would be difficult to understand that from the outside. Nevertheless, Bird’s view of the situation is more charitable than Boy’s at the moment, though that will change (to some extent, anyway) in just a few days. But the central concern of this passage—that it’s society that does this to her, not the other way around—is also a central concern of the text. What do we do when systems are stacked against us? What do our reactions tell us about ourselves?

“We risk becoming so commonplace to the men we’ve thrown our lots in with who can’t see us anymore, and who pat the sofa when they mean to pat our knee. That or we become so incomprehensible that it repulses our husbands, who after all can’t be expected to stomach a side dish of passionate misery at every meal, no matter how much variety there is […] It disturbs me that there’s a part of my heart or mind, or some spot where the two meet, a spot that isn’t mine because I’m a wife.”

Boy takes a grim view of marriage here, even as she seems generally content in her marriage with Arturo. This is an understanding of marriage that lacks agency on the part of the woman, and an understanding that undermines the wife’s sense of identity. Even in her contentment, she can’t help but feel as if she’s lost a part of herself, and one gets the impression that she isn’t entirely certain what she’s gained.

“[It’s] not whiteness itself that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness […] [and] we beat Them (and spare ourselves a lot of tedium and terror) by declining to worship.”

Locating racism in the idea of worshipping whiteness is an important element of the novel because it indicts the Whitmans and Millers for their actions. In this reading, it is not only pure racism that will oppress Bird, but also the kind of colorism practiced by Olivia that will work to oppress her.